Month: February 2016

January blew in and out again in a puff of snow. Seasonal Affective Disorder and Postpartum battled it out in my head. I thought I understood mental illness because when I was a teenager I had a string of bad boyfriends and too many feelings and cried out loudly for help. I thought I understood mental illness because I lack impulse control. I thought I understood mental illness because even after I got a good boyfriend, I still felt sad. I thought I understood mental illness because sometimes I cry on the bathroom floor. I thought I understood mental illness because my aunt tried to kill herself and my other aunt lied about being on the pill because she wanted to get knocked up so she could move out of her parents’ house, and because my mom is a rock from a quarry of dysfunction. I thought I understood mental illness because my good friends are in therapy or on drugs. I thought I understood mental illness because my husband, the good boyfriend, is anxious. I thought I understood mental illness because I know depression is a disease and needs to treated. But I don’t understand this month-sized hole in my chest. And I don’t understand the static in my head. And I don’t understand waking up in the morning and rolling right back over again. And I don’t understand why the usual tricks like focusing on the positive! and giving it some time! aren’t enough to snap me out it. I don’t understand why I thought I’d be immunue. I don’t understand why I’m not immune. This month felt like a year and I hated it for taking me away from my child, my husband, my job.

I wrote the preceding paragraph almost exactly two years ago, in February 2014. Reading it for the first time since then I can’t figure why it took me so long to get help. I quit drinking that year in May, around the same time the weather turned, and my mood lifted considerably, but the blackness returned with the cold in December and I didn’t call a therapist until the following September after months of cycling on and off the wagon, in and out of anxiety, over and over again. The turnaround since then has been incredible. January 2016 wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, I still felt inexplicably sad sometimes, and I cursed the dark days, but I knew what was going on and I knew how to handle it. I didn’t always succeed, but I managed to be present for my family, my job, myself, and today I am happy even though it snowed and I didn’t see the sun. If you are suffering, please know that help is available.

Growing up Mormon is a good way to feel like an iconoclast without getting into too much trouble. No need to smear on the black eyeliner, turn up the hard rock, I was already weird by virtue of the family I was born into, because we went to church for freakishly long three-hour stretches, worshipped a freakishly handsome American Jesus, sent our teenagers to freakishly early six am bible study classes. Fervent religious beliefs and extreme lifestyles make people uncomfortable well before they are capable of articulating why. Mormonism doesn’t feel extreme when you grow up in it and believing that a 14-year-old treasure-seeker dug up a stack of gold plates and translated them into 19th-century American English doesn’t feel any crazier than believing in a virgin birth, but other kids (and their parents) smell the weird on you and keep their distance.

There are as many ways to handle being a weird Mormon kid as there are weird Mormon kids, but some are more common than others. Some of us retreated to the safety of the church, filling our world with church basketball and stake dances and Wednesday night youth group activities. Mormon kids are so fun you almost forget that you’re an outsider at school, in the neighborhood, turning down invitations for a Sunday afternoon birthday party, aching when kids start pairing off in middle school because you aren’t allowed to go on a date until you’re a freakishly old 16. You could say those kids loved church and feared the world.

Some of us ran away from church screaming, testing the waters first by skipping Sunday School to hang out on the bathroom and scowling through church camp, but pretty soon it’s clear that you aren’t cut out for a mission or BYU and won’t be getting married in the temple anytime soon because it is more fun to get drunk and you are already sleeping with your girlfriend anyway. You could say those kids hated church and loved the world.

The least weird of us, the pretty and outgoing ones, somehow transcended their Mormonness and become popular anyway. They are cheerleaders and soccer players and student council presidents and for the most part people admire or at least politely ignore their religious convictions, and it gives the rest of the Mormon kids a little thrill to not just be associated with these sparkly people, to ride the wave of their rising tide, but to have a special claim on them, because only we know their hearts, only we know what it’s like to feel the warmth spread across your chest when you gather around a a fireplace together late at night to listen to somebody talk about believing in Jesus, or believing Joseph Smith, or knowing that your family will all be together again after you die. That’s why Mormons get so excited about famous Mormons, by the way, about the Ken Jennings and the Jarabi Parkers. They are successful in Mormonism and they are successful in life and not only do they make us all a little better by association, but we also think they would probably be nice to us if they met us on the street because being nice to other Mormons is, like, a rule of Mormonism, or so we like to think. You could say those kids loved church and they loved the world and the world and the church loved them right back.

And then there were those of us who couldn’t quite shake the weird in either world. We had a Mormon best friend and a Catholic best friend and counted down the days to see them both. We had crushes on boys and church and at school and didn’t see much difference between them. But we squirmed in our seats when a Sunday School teacher dismissed the Big Bang Theory as silly, and struggled to explain to our beliefs to kids at school. We recoiled when our parents talked about polygamy in heaven and burned with shame when a kid at school asked us how many moms we had. We skipped Sunday School to lurk around the halls with our friends and felt guilty about it, and we skipped Sunday track meets to go to church and felt guilty about that, too. You could say we were the kids who loved church and the world and never felt at home in either realm.

By the time I was 16, I had more friends outside of the church than in, mostly because my family had moved across the country the year before and the Mormon girls in our new town weren’t very nice to me. They were all category three Mormons, pretty and outgoing, and there were enough of them that they didn’t feel like weirdos and so didn’t feel the need to be nice to somebody just because they happened to be a member of the tribe. I’d always been category four, a weirdo at church as much as everywhere else, but I believed in Mormonism with my whole heart.

Over and over, I tried to explain what this meant to my new best friend, a half-Canadian/half-Egyptian atheist with a strict Muslim father and a mother who read tarot, and I never got farther than my plan to get married to a Mormon man in a Mormon temple, in part because I thought that temple marriage was the pinnacle of achievement for a good Mormon girl, but also because my friend would always stop me there, mind boggled by the fact that I could be so certain about who I would marry. “What if you fall in love with somebody who’s not Mormon?” she would ask, incredulous. I would swear back, “I just won’t.” “But how can you be sure?” “I just am…”

I never told her that there actually was a sure-fire way to guarantee that I’d never stray from the fold, one that I’d been taught for years at church and at home. It’s simple, really. Just date Mormons. I knew this was the answer to my friend’s question and I knew it well, but I could never bring myself to repeat the words, to apply them to my life. It didn’t matter that the boy I spent two years of high school pining over was Mormon, that the first boy I dated when I turned 16 was Mormon, that there was hardly a line of good looking non-members knocking at my door. I could not commit to only dating members of my church because I could not bear to close off so much of the world. As much as I valued my faith, Mormon culture was already starting to fit like a scratchy sweater, and the rest of the world looked big and bright and beautiful from my safe harbor. I couldn’t bear to give that up.

A year later, my world shrunk to the size of a tiny white pill as I found myself buried under the weight of addiction that made me feel simultaneously less weird and more alone.

Three years after that I met and fell in love with a boy who blew the world back open. He was not Mormon.

Five years after that I married him in an old adobe church in the middle of the desert. It was not a temple.

Six years after that I still love Mormonism and the world. Together, they gave me life. They gave me my family, my parents and siblings, and also my husband and my daughter. They gave and took and gave and took and gave again sobriety. At 30, I am still a weird Mormon kid at dis-ease in both worlds, but learning that I have a home here in the borderlands.

Did you catch that episode of This American Life about the girl who got sober at 14? As she tells it, she has memories of filching wine at 5 and pouring a big glass of tequila at 9 and becoming an AA poster child shortly after completing a month of rehab at 13. She traded in the shock value hitting rock bottom so early throughout adolescence and early adulthood. She sponsored teenagers like her and adults she thought were like her by the dozen and inspired many more. True to the big book, she accepted responsibility for her actions and her addiction, refusing to lay any blame at the feet of her cruel and neglectful parents or unstable childhood to a point that seems like downright willful denial (she was raised in a cult, for Chrissake!). I don’t remember how she figured it out, because I could see the plot twist from the earliest moments of the episode, but of course she is not an alcoholic. She has no memories of actually abusing alcohol, just sipping incongruously large servings at shockingly young ages. Her mom committed her to an institution for 30 days purportedly for behavioral issues, but really because she wouldn’t let her daughter get away with attempting to call her parental bluff. She did the hard work of unpacking her troubled childhood and her journey to “recovery” with the first people who made her feel safe, and understood, and capable, and discovered that she is absolutely, perfectly capable of drinking in moderation. She even taps out after two glasses of wine because she gets too sleepy.

The trouble with self-diagnosed addiction at a young age is that you can’t trust the label to stick. You don’t know what’s normal. You can’t trust the memory of your experiences. You don’t know how much irrational behavior was due to your underdeveloped teenage brain or to the misfiring neurons of a junkie. What if you are fully capable of drinking like a normal person and you don’t know it because you never tried?

These questions are compounded when you’re talking about a squeaky clean born and bred Mormon girl who took her first drink at 17. Is the first part of the story, the descent, the typical preacher’s daughter trope? In Mormonism, everyone is a preacher’s kid, and binge drinking squealing off the rails is the natural result of growing up in a dry household, sheltered, with no examples of healthy, moderate alcohol consumption. Does the second part of the story, the recovery, merely reflect the uniquely Mormon tendency to label every tempting vice an addiction in order to avoid having to make tough moral choices? Is the goal of total abstention informed more by religious beliefs than by psychological necessity?

This is the shaky foundation of my sobriety story. I’m putting pen to paper in an attempt to answer these questions and rid myself of the seedy, nagging will to self-destruct that started me down this path in the first place.